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Most Reliable Way of Tracking Clicks/Referrals

One of my clients pays for a banner advert on another website. They have contacted me to confirm how many referrals they have had from this advert, however the results provided by the advertiser are different to those showing in Analytics.

The advertiser (i.e. the company who own the website wheret he banner advert is situated) claims that there have been over 180 referrals from that advert. However Analytics shows that there have been less that 120.

The explanation for this provided by the advertiser is that the data in Analytics is unreliable - they use Double Click to track outbound links.

Does anyone have any idea which is the most reliable way to track this information?

5 Responses

The most accurate data collection is to have a script running on your client's site that reads the referrer information on every site visit, looking for that specific advertisement's origin. Ideally that script should then record the visits in a database, along with other info on the visitor once they've come to the site that is relevant to specific goals previously determined (such as whether that visitor then took any specific desired actions).

From there, you'd want an administrator to then have the ability to generate reports on that visitor data.

While Google or Ominture analytics is supposed to provide this tracking, it's possible that that analytics program could fail on some of the visits (just one example being if the site it's sending data to goes down).

Oh here's another possible issue - if someone clicks on that ad, but they never get to your site, your analytics won't show the visit, no matter how you attempt to track it. And people could be bailing out if your site loads slow, or they could be not showing up if there's a breakdown between their browser and your client's site - at their hosting provider, or higher up along the many hops every site visit typically requires.

Hi there, thanks for your swift answer. It's a strange one, if the stats were out by a couple of clicks then fair enough, I'd put it down to Analytics not being 100% accurate. However it's nearly 40% out, so either Analytics is completely unreliable or the reports provided by the advertiser are completely unreliable.

Your second answer is exactly what I have been starting to think. Or perhaps if someone double clicks the advert, that registers as two clicks in the advertisers software.

double clicks shouldn't be allowed but I'm no programming expert on such issues. I have, however, managed many site content management systems that had custom visitor tracking components created. It's one more way to get to the bottom of things. And without it, you'll forever be in battles with the two divergent sets of data.

Another way you can measure is to use a URL shortener like bit.ly and you will be able to see how many people actually clicked the link through their dashboard. I believe that these URL shortners do 301 as well.

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